Three hours into an early Wednesday morning shift, the constable stood in the south corridor of Centre Block, chatting with another member of the House of Commons security force as MPs arrived for their weekly caucus meeting.

A few bored journalists and camera operators congregated around the rotunda inside the Centre Block doors.

The attack that killed a Canadian Forces member in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu two days earlier was still fresh news, and the two men — the constable in uniform, his colleague in plainclothes — speculated about whether something like that could ever happen on Parliament Hill.

Then it did.

“Gun! Gun! Gun!” someone yelled from the main doors, shortly before 10 a.m.

Then a shot.

“I smelled powder and I saw my buddy beside me draw his firearm,” said the constable, a 30-year veteran of Parliament Hill security who asked not to be named for this story. A year later, he still worries about someone targeting his family.

“I said, this is tango time. We’re getting hit. I’m not sure what type of attack we’re getting but in hindsight I’m thinking there’s a possibility the 18 are coming,” he said, in reference to the Toronto 18 terror group that planned to attack Parliament and behead the prime minister.

“I’m scared sh–less. We’re freaking out.”

The constable kicked open the door of the small Commonwealth Room that is adjacent to the Reading Room, where about 150 MPs, senators and staff were gathered for caucus.

Inside, it was a scene of pandemonium.

“Everybody wants to get out. Everybody is nervous. Everybody is scared. Everybody is white.”

The constable held up his hands and told everyone to go back into caucus room.

The constable locked the Commonwealth Room door from the inside.

Where was the prime minister, he wondered?

He cut through the room and opened the connecting door to the Reading Room.

From outside in the Hall of Honour, he heard a series of shots, as gunman Michael Zehaf-Bibeau sprinted down the hall towards the Library of Parliament and the constable’s colleagues fired at him.

On his radio, he heard the message, “Outside shot. Outside gun.” One of the guards was confused and thought the shots were coming outside the building. Then another transmission, “Shots fired in Centre Block.”

Conservative staffers, MPs and senators who had heard the gun shots from a few metres away began barricading the doors. Some took down flags that were arrayed behind the small stage at the front of the room, to use the poles as weapons.

Fingers pointed towards the northeast corner of the room, where a door inset in the wood-panelled wall stood slightly ajar.

The closet is barely four feet in each direction, further cramped by conduit and wiring panels on the walls. With the door closed, it is completely dark and the only sound is a low hum of a cooling fan.

“He was waiting for whoever was supposed to protect him,” the constable said. “His eyes were looking at me like he wanted to know what was going on.

“I looked at him and said, ‘Are you OK?’ He looked at me and said, ‘Yes.’ “

Again, the constable says, he feared a group of terrorists barging in and taking Harper hostage.

“I said, ‘Stay there.’ He nodded.”

Here, the constable’s account differs from the story that has evolved about that day — that his security team had followed protocol by forcing Harper into the closet for his safety.

In fact, says the constable, there was no RCMP security detail in the room at the time Harper went into the closet. Until the constable arrived moments after the shooting, there were no House of Commons security staff there, either.

Under the rules in place at the time, the prime minister’s RCMP protective detail was required to wait outside of Centre Block after handing him off to plainclothes House of Commons guards.

But the plainclothes guards, who stood outside of the caucus room while the meeting was under way, had been locked out by the caucus members when the shooting began.

The constable says he learned that, moments after the first shots, Harper had been spirited into the small electrical utility closet not by security but by staff members – possibly Myles Atwood, the prime minister’s special assistant – and an Ontario senator whose name he does not recall.

(Atwood did not respond to a request for comment.)

He addressed the caucus, telling them there were maybe one or two attackers, based on what he heard on his radio.

“Stay here, we’ll be safe.”

The constable briefly considered giving Harper his bullet-proof Kevlar vest but instead positioned himself closer to the centre of the room, ready to respond if any of the doors were breached.

The constable went on his radio to tell his dispatcher that the prime minister, his ministers and everyone else in the caucus was safe.

The constable estimates that, for about eight minutes, he was the only security official in the room. He was armed only with a baton. To him, it felt like hours.

Then, finally, he heard knocks on the door.

The sound reminded him of the traditional knock at his Free Mason meetings, where he once served in the ceremonial position of Inner Guard, the last line of defence should the Outside Guard be overcome and the lodge breached.

“Who comes here?” he asked, the Masonic response.

Then the radio crackled again. “Open the door, it’s me.” He recognized the voice of his sergeant. “I’m with the RCMP and our guys. We’re coming to get the PM.”

The constable told the caucus members to open the doors.

“Then I go to see the PM. I say, ‘Sir, it’s the RCMP with our guys. We’re getting you out.’ “

Harper nodded.

A group of about five or six RCMP and House of Commons security guards went directly to the closet. They whisked Harper away, out into the Hall of Honour where, minutes earlier, the firefight raged. At the end of the hall, Zehaf-Bibeau’s bullet-riddled body lay in a pool of blood.

Once Harper was gone, the caucus began to applaud.

A sergeant from the House security force came in to explain what had just happened. Later, Sergeant-at-Arms Kevin Vickers came in to say, “I engaged the suspect and the suspect is deceased.“

For the next 10 hours, the constable stayed in the caucus room during the lockdown that followed, opening the door for people to take quick trips to washroom a few metres outside.

Eventually, the constable went out into the Hall of Honour to see Zehaf-Bibeau’s body, lying face down on the marble floor. “It was a gruesome scene.”

While the RCMP and Vickers got much of the credit for defending Parliament, the constable believes the role of House of Commons security was never properly explained.

He believes credit for keeping Harper and everyone else on the Hill safe goes to his “brothers” in House of Commons security, including Alain Gervais, the guard who protected the New Democrat caucus across the Hall; those who fired at and killed the gunman; and especially Samearn Son, the guard who was shot in the leg by Zehaf-Bibeau inside the doors of Centre Block.

“What the guys did that day is truly heroic,” he said. “Everybody put their life in jeopardy to make sure everyone got home.”

The constable says he was disappointed that some questioned that Harper took cover in the caucus room closet.

In the mosh-pit of social media, some critics suggested that, as an able-bodied person, the prime minister should have disregarded the instruction to hide and instead help defend his MPs and senators, a group that included many older people and a quadriplegic in a wheelchair.

Indeed, the day after the shooting, Harper expressed remorse to his caucus for taking refuge in the closet. When asked, months later, whether Harper had done the right thing, Liberal leader Justin Trudeau remarked, “My father raised us to step towards trouble rather than step away from it but, again, I won’t speculate on that.”

In a year-end interview with the CBC, Harper explained, “One of the things you try and do in a situation like that is conceal yourself if you can.

“But obviously the best situation is to exit, as I said, so that you can – so the prime minister can continue to run the government and that’s what we were able to do within a few minutes fortunately.”

To the constable, the questions about the decision to hide in the closet are unfair.

“It depicts him as being a coward, which is not true. He listened to my instructions,” he said.

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